Quotes About Ethics

it is technically a Category Two SoulCrime to remove or conceal a Ministry of Pain–assigned famulus from your immediate person." Lightning flared again as, muttering and mouthing, Benji Dog was stuffed back into Courtney Hall's bag.

satire is not a thing the Compassionate Society has a need for anymore. It's good, it's clever, damn it, it's funny, but it's not Socially Responsible." She could hear the capitals slamming into place like steel teeth.

What right have you to try and take away happiness, false or not, illusory or not?" "Because I believe there must be something more important than happiness. Accountability. Quality. Satire." "Not

What right have you to try and take away happiness, false or not, illusory or not?" "Because I believe there must be something more important than happiness. Accountability. Quality. Satire." "Not in the Compassionate Society.

I don't believe there's any inherent darkness at the center of religion at all. I think religion actually is a morally neutral force.

It was always the view of my parents...that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.

We judge others by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions.

We judge others by their behavior. We judge ourselves by our intentions

It's all just policy to you, isn't it?" Rebus said. "No right and wrong, legal and illegal, no fair and corrupt … just politics." "Listen to yourself, man," Sir Iain Hunter spat. "What are you, some Old Testament prophet? Who gives you the right to hold the scales?" He dug the tip of his umbrella into the ground

Where was the religion for a man who believed that good and bad must coexist, even within the individual? Where was the religion for a man who believed in God but not in God's religion?

Bad Men Do What Good Men

He had been thinking too of goodies and baddies. If you thought bad things – dreams of cruelty and lust – that didn't make you bad. But if your head was full of civilised thoughts and you spent all day as a torturer … It came down to the fact that you were judged by your actions in society, not by the inside of your head.

Sin and evil weren't black – he'd argued the point with a priest – but were greyly anonymous.

There are worse forms of prostitution than whoring. -Inspector John Rebus

Freedom. And Justice. If you have those two, it covers everything. You must stick to those principles and have the courage of your convictions.

Quite possibly one of the most revealing passages about Shakespeare as a man comes from one of the roughest of the jottings made by gossip John Aubrey from his interview with William Beeston, son of the Christopher Beeston who had acted with Shakespeare's company. The partly cancelled note reads: 'the more to be admired, he was not a company keeper. [He] ... wouldn't be debauched, and if invited to, writ [i.e. wrote] he was in pain.' [Ch.24]

One fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human nature—a sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man. Winwood Reade (1872)

I do not wish to live in a society where you are stoned for adultery. I prefer to live in a society where we get stoned first, and then commit adultery.

I was losing, page by page, the fine rules of thought and deed that I had learned in church, from Henry to the Boy Scout Troop in Rockford. I was sopping up the poison off the street like a sponge.

it is easier to legislate a rule than to develop a value.

Frederick Hertzberg begins his famous article "One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?" as follows: "How many articles, books, speeches, and workshops have pleaded plaintively, 'How do I get an employee to do what I want him to do?'" (italics added). Read it again. Is Hertzberg speaking about motivation or manipulation? In

one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap

There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.

If your desire for 'good' is based on greed, it is not good, but greed.